Joe Biden Is a Disaster Waiting to Happen by Branko Marcetic for Jacobin.
Joe Biden Is Hillary Clinton 2.0 – Democrats Would Be Mad to Nominate Him by Medhi Hasan for The Intercept.
Joe Biden Is a Fraud, Pure and Simple by Norman Solomon for truthdig.
American women did very well in the 2018 elections for themselves, and also for the Democratic Party. The results aren’t all in, but here’s a preliminary tally.
At least 102 women were elected to the House of Representatives, including 89 Democrats and just 13 Republicans. Among the 36 newcomers, only one was a Republican.
The makeup of the Senate stayed the same, with 17 Democratic and six Republican women. There’s a runoff election in Mississippi on Tuesday, in which a white Republican woman is running against a black Democratic man, so there’s a possibility of one more Republican woman.
A record 43 women of color were elected to Congress. Only one was a Republican.
The number of women governors increased from six (two Democrats, four Republicans) to nine (six Democrats, three Republicans). The number of women serving in state legislatures will cross 2,000 for the first time. I don’t know how many are Democrats, but I bet a lot of them are.
The establishment Democrats won the 2018 primaries and general election. They could win the 2020 presidential election if the presidential vote mirrors this year’s congressional vote.
By establishment Democrats, I mean the Democrats who, like Nancy Pelosi, seek to strike a balance between the desires of the donor class, who finance campaigns, and working people and racial minorities, who are their core voters.
The establishment Democrats focus on President Trump’s obnoxious personal behavior, the Russiagate investigations and racial and gender issues that don’t affect the power elite.
By progressive Democrats, I mean the Democrats who, like Bernie Sanders, raise money from small donors and regard the Wall Street banks and the billionaire class as enemies.
The progressive Democrats advocate policies such as Medicare for all, a $15 an hour minimum wage and the breakup of the “too big to fail” banks.
The establishment Democrats’ strategy is to win over independents and moderate Republicans who are disgusted with Donald Trump. They see their mandate as putting things back the way they were before President Trump was elected.
The progressive Democrats’ strategy is to rally labor union members, people of color and other historic Democratic constituencies who’ve grown apathetic because of failure of the Democratic leaders to represent their interests.
Nancy Pelosi, who is almost certain to become Speaker of the House of Representatives in 2019, said she will pursue a policy of fiscal responsibility, which rules out much of the progressive agenda.
She will insist all new spending be on a pay-as-you-go basis—that is, every new appropriation be accompanied by a tax increase or a spending cut elsewhere. She also will insist on supermajorities for tax increases on the bottom 80 percent of taxpayers.
This would rule out an ambitious infrastructure program, a Green New Deal jobs program, Medicare for all and most of the other programs of the progressive Democrats. What she will offer instead is strong support for reproductive rights and investigations into Trump administration scandals—although she has ruled out impeachment of the President.
Democrats got 8.9 million more total votes than Republicans in elections for the House of Representatives. Their margin of victory in the popular vote was 8 percent, versus 2.3 percent for Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.
Democrats raised much more money than Republicans, according to OpenSecrets. The average Democratic Senatorial candidate raised $3.5 million; the average Republican, $1.5 million. The average Democratic House candidate raised $612,203; the average Republican, $502,805.
Catalyst reported that 56 percent of voters lived in suburban census tracts, versus 26 percent in rural tracts and 18 percent in urban tracts. The voters were 76 percent white and 63 percent age 50 or older.
The influence of big donations and the nature of the electorate explains why establishment Democrats did so well. But progressives made gains. Democrats gained compared to 2014 among their historic core supporters as well as independents and moderate Republicans.
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Democrats have good reason to be hopeful for 2020. Right now President Trump has a 40 percent approval rating, compared to 46 percent for Barack Obama and 45 percent for Bill Clinton at this point in their presidencies.
The Republican loss of 39 or more Congressional seats is above average for an incumbent party in a mid-term election, but it is less than the 63 lost by Democrats two years into the Obama presidency and 54 lost two years into the Clinton presidency.
The kinds of Democrats who go to college, get an entrepreneurial career or move to a big city — those who embrace a relatively unpredictable life — want an entirely different role for the federal government: they want the state to invest in modernization, with more high-skilled immigration, expansive free trade agreements, and performance-based charter schools.
Source: The Ferenstein Wire.
Startup founders and college-educated liberals fundamentally reject an atomistic conception of Society: government should be involved in personal decisions, such as finishing school or eating healthy, because they believe that personal decisions ripple out and significantly affect most people in Society.
Source: The Ferenstein Wire
Economically, the technology industry exacerbates inequality between the rich and middle-class, but eradicates poverty by making essential goods freely accessible. Ultimately, this will trend toward a two-class society of extremely wealthy workaholics who create technologies that allow the rest of society to enjoy leisurely prosperity. The cost for this prosperity will be inequality of influence
Source: The Ferenstein Wire.
Click to enlarge.
A San Francisco journalist named Gary Ferenstein says the Democratic Party is no longer the party of factory workers and organized labor. It is the party of college-educated professionals and high-tech companies, he says, and this is a good thing.
He has published a manifesto on behalf of the Silicon Valley Democrats—which include Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton—and against “protectocrats” such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
While not all Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and professionals think alike, any more than labor union members, white people or any other large category of people do, I think that Ferenstein does speak for many people from that background, and that his ideas are worth discussing.
His basic idea is that the government should give free rein to creative entrepreneurs, while trying to change individual behavior so as to make people more productive. The high-tech start-up corporation is his model for all the institutions of society.
Unlike the typical neo-liberal, he does not advocate allowing people to fend for themselves. Government should assure everyone an adequate education, adequate medical care and everything else they need to be economically productive.
Click to enlarge.
He believes that the key to better education and better public health services is internal competition. He therefore favors Obamacare over a universal single-payer system, and charter schools over universal public education.
This is a form of radicalism that has appeared time and again in modern history—a radicalism that would revolutionize the way people live, yet leave the structure of political and economic power unchanged.
Ferenstein asserts that change is always good, there are no fundamental conflicts in society and education is the solution to all problems. Nobody struggling to survive in today’s harsh economy would believe any such thing, but I’m sure that there is a constituency that does.
He deserves credit for making that constituency’s assumptions explicit, and showing how they influence the Democratic Party leadership.
What follows is more of Ferenstein’s Silicon Valley manifesto, my comments and links to the full text of his writings.
Excerpts from the works of Nobel winner Svetlana Alexievich by the Associated Press.
Boys In Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich for Granta. The title refers to the zinc-lined coffins in which bodies of Soviet troops were shipped home from Afghanistan.
Nobel laureate Alexievich on Putin and Soviet trauma for the France24 TV network. (Hat tip to O)
Svetlana Alexievich captured the psyche – and trauma – of a Soviet people and nation by Elena Gapova for The Conversation.
Svetlana Alexievich
I never heard of Svetlana Alexievich until she won the Nobel Prize for Literature. She is a non-fiction writer from Belarus, which before 1991 was part of the USSR and Russian Empire.
Her theme is said to be the spiritual vacuum left by the fall of Communism. She seems like a writer worth getting to know about.
The average Russian has a little Red Man inside who longs for the return of a strong, authoritarian ruler, she says; that is the secret of Vladimir Putin’s power and the reason for his aggressive policies.
Game On! For Abe in Asia by Peter Lee for China Matters.
Peter Lee thinks the Trans Pacific Partnership is part of a U.S. strategy to checkmate China by building up Japanese power and influence in the Pacific region. Specifically, he thinks Japanese companies could use the TPP to block Chinese infrastructure projects in Vietnam and Malaysia on the grounds that Chinese companies enjoy unfair government subsidies.
Leaked (final?) TPP intellectual property chapter spells doom for free speech online by Corey Doctorow for Boing Boing.
Hat tip to zero hedge.
This chart was created by Verdant Labs. If you click on that link, you can find the original chart, plus an additional interactive chart with information about more occupations. For example, it shows that, in my own former job of journalist, there are 88 Democrats for every 12 Republicans.
This by the way does support the claim of conservatives that reporters tend to be liberals, but I’m not sure what, if anything, could be done to change this. An affirmative action program for journalists who claim to be conservatives? I don’t think that would work.
I often hear that Americans prefer political centrists, but Americans classified by occupation are strongly polarized. Interestingly, though, if you go to the original Verdant Labs article, you will find that some of the top corporate and business positions are more evenly divided between the two parties than many of the middle-class and working-class jobs.
I can understand while environmental protection workers would tend to be Democrats while oil field workers would tend to be Republicans. But some of the other political polarizations seem to based on people deciding to fit stereotypes than the actual positions of the two parties.
Paul Krugman, whom I respect, thinks that Americans will have a real choice in 2016 between the Republicans, who represent the wealthy, and the Democrats, who represent the public interest.
I think he’s right about the Republicans, but I’m not so sure about the Democrats. Here’s what he wrote:
Paul Krugman
As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other.
The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.
For example, any Democrat would, if elected, seek to maintain the basic U.S. social insurance programs — Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid — in essentially their current form, while also preserving and extending the Affordable Care Act.
Any Republican would seek to destroy Obamacare, make deep cuts in Medicaid, and probably try to convert Medicare into a voucher system.
When Barack Obama ran for President, he promised lower taxes on the American middle class and higher taxes on the super-rich. Public opinion polls show most Americans favor this.
Now, in the seventh year of his Presidency, Obama has a new tax plan that will do just that—reduce taxes by $175 billion on working people and increase taxes by $320 billion mainly on holders of financial assets.
It’s not a radical plan, but it’s almost certain to be opposed by Republicans in Congress, and that will make a good campaign issue for Democrats in 2016.
The cynic in me wonders why the President didn’t introduce this in 2009 when Democrats had majorities in both houses of Congress, and there was some possibility it would be enacted.
But the pragmatist in me thinks it is a good thing to get politicians and the public talking about tax justice even if it doesn’t result in legislation on the first try.
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President Obama finally has his Piketty moment by Matt O’Brien for the Washington Post. Hat tip to Cannonfire.
Five things about Barack Obama’s Robin Hood tax plan by Brian Faler for Politico.
60 Words and a War Without End: The Untold Story of the Most Dangerous Sentence in U.S. History by Gregory D. Johnson for BuzzFeed.
The Authorization for the Use of Military Force was intended to give President George W. Bush the authority to hunt down the terrorists who plotted the 9/11 attacks. But President Bush and President Obama after him have used it as justification for any kind of covert or military action anywhere in the world that they deem necessary for national security. This article tells how AUMF was enacted, and the debate over its meaning.
Nonviolent Conflicts in 2014 You May Have Missed Because They Were Not Violent by Erica Chenoweth for Political Violence @ A Glance.
Violent methods of struggle have more credibility than non-violent methods. When mass defiance fails, it is seen as a reason to shift to violent struggle. When violent struggle fails, it is seen as a reason to double down on violence.
FBI says search warrants not needed to use “stingrays” in public places by David Kravets for ars technica.
The FBI has erected fake cell phone towers which it uses to intercept and listen in on cell phone conversations.
Bernie Sanders Brutal Letter on Obama’s Trade Pact Foreshadows 2016 Democratic Clash by Zach Carter for Huffington Post.
Why the Tech Elite Is Getting Behind Universal Basic Income by Nathan Schneider for Vice News.
From Andrew Jackson to Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democratic Party was the party of white working men, with all the good and bad things that phrase implies.
Now a majority of white Americans vote Republican and the Republicans are especially strong among blue-collar white working men with high school educations—people who in FDR’s time would have been the backbone of the Democratic Party.
I think there is a very obvious way that the Democrats (or, for that matter, the Republicans) could win the votes of the majority of white working people, and it is the same way they could win the votes of the majority of black, brown, yellow and red working people.
It is to put the United States on the path to a full employment, high wage economy. I admit I do not have a blueprint on how to accomplish this, but there are a number of obvious things that would be both popular and beneficial to the vast majority.
Public opinion polls show a majority of Americans favor (1) a higher minimum wage, (2) prosecution of financial fraud, (3) breakup of “too big to fail” banks and (4) higher taxes on millionaires and billionaires and lower taxes on middle class and working people.
Polls also show a majority of Americans are opposed to (1) NATA-style trade pacts and (2) chipping away at Social Security and Medicare. In all these cases, the American people are wiser than the decision-makers in Washington.
I think the AFL-CIO has some good ideas. But I don’t think the problem is lack of good ideas, or even the inability to convince the public of good ideas.
The problem is that certain financial institutions and corporations are so entrenched in the federal government, in lobbying and in the political parties’ nominating process that they have the power to block good ideas.
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Hillary Clinton Presidency Could Have the Same Problems as Obama’s by Norm Scheiber for The New Republic.
Can We Talk? Here’s Why the White Working Class Hates Democrats by Kevin Drum for Mother Jones.
Have Democrats Failed the White Working Class? by Thomas Edsall for the New York Times.
Our real white male problem: Why Fox News beats Bruce Springsteen and liberal moralizing every time by Jim Sleeper for Salon.
Double click to enlarge
Here’s an interesting chart showing the most common American first names, and the likelihood someone of that name will be a Democrat or a Republican.
People named Jasmine, Caitlin or Abigail are almost certain to be Democrats, and people named Duane, Brent or Troy are very likely to be Republicans.
Yes, there is a gender gap, with more women’s names on the Democratic side and men’s names on the Republican side.
Men named Dylan are the ones most likely to be Democrats, and women named Tammy most likely to be Republicans.
Vickie (with an “ie”) is on the Republican side of the chart, but Vicky (with a “y”) and Victoria are on the Democratic side.
Men named Philip (who spell their names with one “l”, like me) are near the middle, but slightly on the Republican side, but less so than people named Phillip (with two “ll”s).
I’m not sure of the significance of this—if any.
It is not hard to understand the Republican motive for wanting to make it more difficult for poor people, minorities and young people to vote.
Neither is it hard to understand the motive for wanting to remove minorities from voting rolls by fair means or foul. I don’t respect the motive, but I understand it.
What I do not understand is why the Democrats are so passive about this. Why aren’t Democrats fighting against the obstacles that keep their constituent groups from voting, and fighting to get their supporters registered and to the polls? It’s almost as if they don’t care about winning.
Remembering Heinlein’s Rule, I never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity and inertia.
But if I were more cynical than I actually am, I would say it as if the Democratic leaders fear being identified with poor people, minorities and the young more than they want their votes.
If I were even more cynical than that, I would say it is as if Democratic leaders would rather lose than increase the influence of poor people, minorities and the young within their party.
I think the Democrats (with some exceptions) deserved to lose the last election, but I don’t think the Republicans (with some exceptions) deserved to win.
Rather than bringing about change we can believe in, the Obama administration and its supporters in Congress committed to perpetual warfare, Big Brother surveillance, bailouts for the banks and austerity for everybody else.
But the Republicans did not win by proposing a constructive alternative. Rather they won by stoking fears of Ebola, ISIS, immigrants and gun confiscation, by attack dads financed by dark money, and by suppressing and discouraging the votes of minorities, poor people and young people.
I don’t think the American people are committed to the Republican Party, but I think they are willing to give the Republicans a chance to show what they can do, just as they were willing to give the Democrats a chance in 2006 and 2008.
If the Republicans can put the USA on the path to peace and prosperity, they will deservedly make their majority permanent. If they fail or make things worse, which I think is highly probable, their sweep will be as ephemeral as the Democrats’ victories of six or eight years ago.
If you think of Barack Obama as a liberal, he is a political failure. If you think of him as a conservative, he is a political genius.
He told a group of Wall Street bankers early in his administration that he was the only thing standing between them and the mob with pitchforks. And he in fact has succeeded in protecting them from angry bi-partisan public opinion.
No Republican president would have dared, as President Obama has done, to proposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare in return for modest tax increases and a balanced budget. Yet he gets a pass on this, because of his political skills and because right-wing Republicans attack him for all the wrong reasons.
Obama gets the votes of African-Americans even though he continues a war on drugs that sends millions of poor young black men to prison for trivial reason, and makes them legitimate targets for racial discrimination. He gets the votes of pro-immigration Hispanic voters even though he is deporting unauthorized migrants in record numbers. It takes great political skill to do this.
Recently he suggested privatization of U.S. roads and bridges inasmuch as Congress and state governments decline to appropriate the necessary money for their upkeep. He cited Ohio’s sale of the Ohio Turnpike as a good example. This is something that, if Barry Goldwater had proposed it 50 years ago, would have been considered an example of right-wing extremism.
When I was a college student in the 1950s, I read THE AGE OF JACKSON by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and, for many years, accepted his ideas about American politics.
Schlesinger argued that American politics (as of 1945) was based on a permanent conflict between big business and its opponents.
A succession of parties—the Federalists, the Whigs and then the Republicans—represented the interests of the banks, merchants, railroads and manufacturing corporations. The Democratic Party and its Jeffersonian predecessors represented a diverse coalition of people whose interests might be threatened or harmed by big business.
Andrew Jackson
The political health of the United States, as he saw it, required an alternation in power and between these two sides.
The Republican Party was needed to speak for the American capitalist interest, which was what gave the United States its economic energy. But the Democratic Party, of which Schlesinger was an active supporter, was needed to prevent a dangerous concentration of power in corporations.
The Democrats did not represent an equivalent danger to liberty, in his view, because their coalition of supporters was so diverse—labor unions, immigrants, Southern planters, Catholics, black people, farmers, small business—and their program would represent a balancing of interests rather than a single interest.
I think Schlesinger’s analysis was true as far as it went. The Democratic Party, as represented by the Indian fighter and slave-owner Andrew Jackson, really was the party of the common man—at least the white common man. Jackson scandalized upper-crust Washington by allowing frontiersmen and working people to participate in his inauguration. He did fight to prevent the government from becoming the servant of the banks and the manufacturers.
But the Democratic Party also reflected the prejudices and racism of the white common people. Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, the great defender of Southern slavery, said there were no class distinctions in the South because all white people were part of an aristocracy of race. This was not an aberration, and not limited to the South. It was central to the Democrats’ identity for a century or more, and it was not limited to Democrats in the South.
The problem with Schlesinger’s analysis, and also its appeal, is that it enabled liberal Democrats like me to regard the South’s one-party system as merely incidental. In fact it was fundamental.
College educated intellectuals and reformers of the 19th century were mainly Whigs and Republicans. The great New England humanitarian reformers that we Unitarian Universalists admire were mostly Whigs or Republicans. The Republican Party was founded as a movement to prevent the spread of slavery, which the Democrats supported. What little support there was for civil rights between the Civil War and Second World War came from Republicans.
Barack Obama
Broadly speaking and with many exceptions, there is one party that accepted social distinctions based on wealth and education, and minimized social distinctions based on race, and another party that resented distinctions based on social class and insisted on social distinctions based on race.
Now it is the Republican Party that gets the votes of a majority of white people, and the Democratic Party that depends on minorities’ votes to give it a margin of victory. I think that any American prior to 1932 would have thought it unbelievable that the United States would have a black President, but they would have found it unimaginable that a black President would be a Democrat.
During the middle and late 20th century, college-educated reformers and racial minorities migrated to the Democratic Party. But the Republicans still represent corporate and financial interests as they always have, and what little support there is for organized labor and workers’ rights still comes from Democrats.
The political realignment that began during the Truman administration and reached its culmination during the Reagan administration was not a reversal of roles, but a new mix and match. My thoughts about how this came about will be the subject of another post.
In the 1920s and early 1930s, Germany’s Nazis thought of American white Southerners as soul brothers. But they were wrong. The Southern Democrats in the U.S. Congress were the Nazis’ sworn enemies.
In a previous post, I summarized Ira Katznelson’s Fear Itself: the New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, and his account of how the Southern Democrats both supported and set limits on FDR’s New Deal reforms of the 1930s. In this post, I carry my reading of Katznelson’s book forward into how the Southern Democrats shaped U.S. policy toward the Axis and then toward the Soviets.
Hitler despised black people, admired the Ku Klux Klan and regretted the defeat of the South in the Civil War, as a lost opportunity to create a society based on inequality and slavery. He loved the movie, “Gone With the Wind,” which he watched while awaiting the news of the German invasion of the USSR.
While the Old South states were not dictatorships, they were similar to Hitler’s Germany in that all were ruled by a single party with restricted franchise. In 1936, Franklin Roosevelt received 97 percent of the vote in Mississippi and 99 percent in South Carolina, with some counties reporting not a single Republican vote. This is equal to what Hitler and Stalin got in their plebiscites.
But although Hitler had great esteem for the American South, this feeling was not reciprocated. The South was the most anti-Nazi, pro-British and pro-interventionist region of the United States.
Katznelson is not completely sure why. One explanation is that white Southerners were mostly of British descent, and felt sympathy for the mother country in peril. There is something to this. New England Yankees, also of British descent, were strong interventionists. Ethnic ties never entirely die.
I think that, in addition, Southerners were sincerely devoted to their idea of democracy—limited government, legislative supremacy, state’s rights and individual freedom (for white people), which, for all their racism, was diametrically opposed to Hitler’s totalitarianism.
Also, the South is the only part of the United States with a historical memory of invasion and defeat. That may have made the Nazi threat seem more real to them than to other Americans.
And finally, I don’t think the South is as war-averse other parts of the United States. When I did my Army service in the 1950s, the career soldiers were disproportionately Southern, and I don’t think this was for economic reasons. Southerners regard military service as honorable and worthy of respect.
Be that as it may, the South was united in support for Britain and resistance to Hitler in a way that the rest of the country was not.
I remember Jefferson-Jackson Day picnics and politicians’ speeches about the Democratic Party’s four great champions of the common people—Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.
What I didn’t think about was that Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were Southern slaveholders, and Woodrow Wilson was a Southern-born segregationist.
Now I have just finished reading Fear Itself: the New Deal and the Origins of Our Time, by Ira Katznelson, which tells how the Southern white supremacists shaped the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman in ways that still affect the USA today. It made me see the history of that era in a new way.
Without the Southern Democrats in Congress, the New Deal legislation would not have been enacted. Lend-Lease aid to Britain and a military draft system would not have been approved prior to U.S. entry into World War Two, and the Cold War.
I grew up in a family that idolized Franklin D. Roosevelt. But the history of the New Deal era is more than the saga of FDR.
He might have attempted to rule as a dictator. Katznelson showed how many people in 1933 felt that American capitalism and democracy were collapsing, and that the USA needed a Mussolini. But he did not make the attempt.
FDR did claim and exercise sweeping powers greater than exercised by any previous President in peacetime. But he never exercised any power not granted by Congress. As a result the United States went through 20 years of crisis with its Constitutional structure intact. The price of this was that U.S. policy was confined within what Katznelson called a “Southern cage.”
From most of 1933-1953, Democrats were a majority in Congress. But a majority of the Democratic Senators and Representatives were Southerners, and, because of the seniority system, Southerners were chairs of key committees. Without Southern cooperation, FDR’s proposals could not have been enacted.
Southern Democrats were not antagonistic to the New Deal as such. They wanted curbs on the power of Northern banks, railroads and other corporations, federal public works and relief for the homeless and unemployed—provided that they got these things in a way that did not disturb white supremacy in the South.
Senate Majority Leader Joseph Robinson of Arkansas backed the New Deal, as one observer said, “so long as they fought the money power and the big industries—so long as they were pro-farmer and did not stir up the niggers [sic].”
John Atkinson writes as follows in Common Dreams.
Remember “hope and change?” At the time, few thought to ask what exactly we were hoping for and what exactly we were changing to.
And of course, what we got was a great slogan, better speeches, very little change and even less hope.
Here’s what Obama promised:
Shutting down Gitmo;
Ending warrantless wiretapping;
Ending foreign wars;
An end to trickle down economics;
Greater regulation of Wall Street and the financial sector;
A public option for health care;
Protecting social security, Medicaid and Medicare;
Serious action on climate change;
Greater equality in opportunity and more broadly shared prosperity …
Here’s what we got: An administration that set up Goldman Sachs south in the Treasury, doubled down on domestic spying; expanded a drone policy that creates between 40 to 60 new terrorists for every one it kills; health care reform that is better than the status quo, but which rewards corporate insurers as much or more than it does citizens; international trade agreements that favor corporate interests, while eviscerating domestic wages, scuttling environmental performance, and crippling US industrial infrastructure. It’s so bad, they’re trying to negotiate it in secret … … …
So now enter Hillary Clinton and the deluded Democrats who hopd for her Presidency. Maybe it’s time to ask what, specifically, we will get; what we can hope for, and whether it will usher in changes Americans overwhelmingly want … …. .
And here’s the answer – If we nominate Hillary Clinton we will get another DLC Democrat who mouths progressive values during the campaign, then shifts to the right when (and if) elected. In short, citizens get no real choice. … … …
The fact is, the people’s interests aren’t being represented in Washington and they won’t be if Hillary Clinton is elected. Her record is clear. She’s an ardent proponent of trade agreements; she’s consistently supported the interests of Wall Street over Main Street; she’s been hawkish on foreign policy; weak on civil protections; hawkish on the deficit (until very recently) and mum on many other issues that demand a progressive advocate.
Click on Hillary Clinton and the Future Failure of Progressive Hope and Change for Atkinson’s whole article.
Hat tip to Mike Connelly for the link.
The Democratic Party is in deep trouble going into the 2014 elections, and it’s not solely due, or even mainly due, to gerrymandering, voter suppression or other dirty tricks by Republicans.
Thomas Ferguson
Their main problem is that the Obama administration is five years old, and there has been no economic recovery for the vast majority of Americans. While Democrats can justly claim that the economic crash is due to the policies of the Bush administration, voters have a right to expect that by now, the Obama administration would have offered an alternative.
Recognizing the problem, President Obama has started talking about income inequality, and trying to re-energize the Democratic base of support — union members, working women, Hispanic-Americans and African-Americans. The problem for the President and for Democrats generally is how to do this without jeopardizing their support from big-money donors whose contributions they need to win.
This is a tightrope that Obama has been able to walk so far. The question is how long he can get away with it.
Political scientist Thomas Ferguson, who is known for his “investment theory” of political parties, and fellow academics Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen recently published an analysis which concluded that the 2012 elections were basically a contest between different factions of the upper 1 percent of income earners.
Nearly two-thirds of itemized contributions to the Obama campaign and more than 70 percent of itemized contributions to the Romney campaign came from donors who contributed $10,000 or more. Roughly the same breakdowns held for the proportions of total contributions in amounts of $500 or more. Obama received more small donations than Romney, but both got the bulk of their funds from big donors.
That’s not to say nothing was at stake. Republican candidates tend to get the support of the oil and gas industry; Democrats the telecommunications and computer industry. Wall Street shifts back and forth between the two parties, but exercises strong influence over both.
The 2014 congressional elections will be the same, only worse, Ferguson, Jorgensen and Chen predicted, since recent court decisions have removed the last vestiges of restrictions on campaign contributions.
Thomas Frank wrote an eloquent article recently in Harper’s magazine, indicting college-educated progressive Democrats for their passivity and their disconnect from the concerns of working people. He wrote that they are waiting for the Republican Party to be destroyed by the Tea Party movement, just as in earlier eras they waited for the GOP to be destroyed by George W. Bush, Newt Gingrich, supply-side economics, Watergate and Barry Goldwater.
The Democrats’ problem is not just the power of money. It is that, for many Democrats, the power of money is not an issue.
Thomas Ferguson is a political scientist whose writings changed the way I think about politics. His “investment theory of political parties” is that candidates for office are like entrepreneurs, wealthy corporate interests are like venture capitalists who provide capital, and the voters are like customers being sold the product.
Ferguson says the public gets to decide who wins, but the “investors” get to decide who runs. That’s why elected officials normally pay more attention to the people who finance them than the people who vote for them, and why politicians so often do the opposite of what they promise and what their constituents want.
Ferguson and two other scholars, Paul Jorgensen and Jie Chen, recently did a study of the 2012 election campaign which bears this out. What was noteworthy, they wrote, is that the strong support Obama got from Silicon Valley companies. Romney got more support from big business as a whole, but Obama got as much or more from the telecommunications, software, web manufacturing, electronics, computer and defense industries.
All these industries, as they point out, are deeply involved with the National Security Agency, as suppliers of technology, as sub-contractors and as aiders and abettors of surveillance. The overseas businesses of Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Skype, YouTube and other companies have been gravely damaged by Edward Snowden’s disclosures of how they work with the NSA to spy on foreign governments, businesses and citizens. No wonder Obama regards Snowden as Public Enemy No. 1.
Gary Segura, writing in Democracy Journal, looks to demographic changes, especially the growth in the U.S. Hispanic population, to save the Democratic Party.
When Barack Obama is almost certainly re-elected this November, Latinos will have played a decisive role in crucial swing states like Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, and Florida, and even in states where their population share is smaller. Latinos should comprise just under 10 percent of the national electorate this year, compared with just 5.4 percent in 2000 and 3.7 percent in 1992. At 15 percent of the national electorate by 2024 (a conservative estimate), and concentrated in several large-population states, Latino political power will have moved Arizona firmly into the Democratic column in the next decade and will eventually have created a chance for Democrats to carry Texas.
Republicans nationally receive 85 percent of their votes from white voters by capturing between 55 and 60 percent of their ballots in each election. This margin, coupled with just enough votes from minorities, may be sufficient to eke out victories in the near term. But with the demographic decline of white voters, even 60 percent of that cohort will be a poor start when it comprises just two-thirds of the electorate in 2024; 60 percent of two-thirds would net the GOP just 39.6 percent of the national vote. Republicans must improve their standing with minority voters to remain competitive over the next century.
Can the GOP respond? In the short run, I don’t think so. Race played a critical role in the formation of the GOP coalition and is the principal reason that working-class white males, particularly in the South, have been so willing to embrace the party despite its economic policies. To remove race and its rhetoric from Republican politics would serve to make the party more welcoming to minority voters but would also eliminate the primary claim the party makes in attracting those working-class whites.
Actually, Hispanic voters are becoming disillusioned with President Obama. That is why he is trying to appease them with his executive order forbidding deportation of certain categories of unauthorized immigrants who were brought to this country as a child.
The larger problem is that the reason that neither the Democratic nor the Republican leaders have policies that would move the nation from war and recession to peace and prosperity. That is why Democrats and Republicans rely on group loyalty to appeal, respectively, to Hispanics and working-class non-Hispanic whites.
Click on The Browning of America for Gary Segura’s complete article.
Click on The Democrats’ Demographic Dreams for a critique. [Added 6/20/12]
Click on President Obama bristles when he is the target of activist tactics he once used for details about how discontented Hispanic leaders pressured Obama on immigration policy.
Click on Yes, Barack Obama Thinks We’re Stupid (Immigration Edition) for more on the politics of President Obama’s new immigration policy. [Added 6/20/12]
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